Report Reflects Importance of Search Marketing, Internet Advertising

If there was every any doubt in your mind that search marketing is the way of the future (well, and now), just take a look at the report released today by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Despite the unpredictable economy and the rollercoaster-like tendencies of the US stock market, the report released by IAB and PwC shows that internet marketing is going nowhere but up.

“Internet ad revenues rose 23.2 percent—to a record $14.9 billion—in the first half of 2011, according to figures released today by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC US). The rate of growth more than doubled year-over-year, as last year’s first-half ad revenues of $12.1 billion had represented an 11.3 percent increase over 2009.”

Just in the second quarter of this year, there was a 24% increase in revenue, bringing the amount made from internet ads to $7.7 billion (last year that number was 6.2 billion). Further, 49% of all spending ($7.3 billion) went towards Search – the highest of any category. Display advertising – which includes digital video, banner ads, rich media, and sponsorships – accounted for 37% of all spending in the first half of 2011, the second highest behind search. According to the press release, these two modes of advertising have grown about 27% since last year – and search more than doubled (last years growth rate was only 11.6%). While search is growing at more than twice the rate it was in 2010, videos are being used for advertising 42% more than they were last year. In the first half of 2011, videos raked in $891 million in revenue for companies utilizing online advertising.

What Does This Mean?

This means that despite the stagnant economic climate, businesses are still (if not more than they were before) confident in the effectiveness of interactive marketing. These companies are using search, display advertising, videos and more to market themselves online, and they are seeing results from these tactics. According to the press release, President and CEO of IAB, Randall Rothenberg, had the following to say about these results: “The remarkably resilient performance of interactive advertising so far in 2011 demonstrates that more marketers are placing big bets on digital to tell their brand stories.”

Clearly, many people find digital advertising to be more cost-effective, as it is track-able and provides value to those creating the ads as well as those viewing them (in the form of entertainment AND a better understanding of the company doing the advertising). This is why companies are using the internet as a medium of transmission of their brand messages and to advertise themselves. Likely, social media marketing plays into this a great deal. With the encouragement of targeted advertising and the emphasis on content like videos that have come both with the “business-ization” of sites like Facebook and the quality changes inspired by Google’s Panda, many companies better understand what their target audiences want, and that these audiences can best be found online. Interactive marketing is not only the way of the future – it’s the way of (success) today.

Though companies are spending a great deal of money on this form of advertising, they are receiving great value and achieving impressive results. David Silverman, a PwC partner is quoted as saying, “Fueling this growth is the ability of advertisers to correlate performance and results with the dollars they are investing.” Marketers are finding track-able results in the interactive advertising space, and are therefore are concentrating their efforts there.

More Information

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